Volume 9, Issue 3, October 1996

Recent studies have highlighted the importance of the litigation motif in Job.  A key strand of this motif is Job’s calling on a legal functionary to come to his aid.  Many attempts have been made to identify such a figure, with the debate largely focusing on whether God or a third party is being summoned.  It has been argued that Job’s underlying desire is for a restored relationship with God, yet neither God nor a person other than God is on view.  Indeed, no identifiable figure is envisaged, for Job is exploring any imaginable possibility, rather than hoping realistically.  Such a view does most justice to difficult verses like 16:21 and 17:3, and is reinforced by the use in each passage of a different title to describe the figure.  One consequence of this conclusion is that crucial passages like 16:18-22 and 19:25-27 are not to be understood as Job affirming a confident faith in either his vindication or resurrection.

The quid-pro-quo stance to human suffering is prominent in psychological practice, in everyday life, and in attitudes to survivors of the Holocaust.  In this view, suffering is the consequence of unrighteousness.  Old Testament Wisdom literature as a whole is non-determinative about the cause of suffering, but much theology and christology still remains determinative, to the harm of suffering human beings .

The centrality of reconciliation within the church’s theology and the power of symbols of reconciliation within its life have paradoxically limited the church’s ability to seek reconciliation for wrongdoing done in its name.  In this article the author explores this apparent paradox by examining a particularly bold symbol of reconciliation developed within the church, namely the public penance performed by the Emperor Theodosius at  the urging of St Ambrose.

C. M. LaCugna argues that the modern “defeat” of trinitarian thinking can be attributed to the separation of speech about God’s unity from speech about God’s triunity, and that the Palamite distinction between essence and energies in God is a step in this process.  It is argued here that the essence/energies distinction is made in a different theological context, and has neither the intention nor the effect of detracting from a trinitarian doctrine of God.

The reception of Jacques Derrida’s work among both literary critics and biblical scholars has frequently taken the form of  “deconstructive” exegesis, that is, textual studies which imitate his style of reading.  Such readings fail to recognise that Derrida’s unique literary style forms part of his philosophical project.  Derrida’s aims as a philosopher are most clearly to be seen in his reading of the work of Edmund Husserl.  Husserl argues that, for our knowledge to have any lasting validity, the objects of our knowledge must be “ideal” objects, independent (in principle) of any particular act of knowing.  By calling into question Husserl’s analysis, Derrida’s work threatens all our attempts to identify textual meaning, and calls into question the interpreter’s very raison d ‘e[tre.  Therefore, rather than imitating Derrida’s exegetical style, biblical scholars would be better engaged grappling with this philosophical challenge.

Relating the historical Jesus to images of Jesus in Christian tradition and to the experiences of a contemporary audience has proven a burdensome task in the modern period.  In the present day, various disjunctions and entanglements with religious and non-religious features of social life intensify the crisis of identity experienced by many Christians.  Juan Luis Segundo and Burton Mack stand out as two interpreters of the historical Jesus who have approached the problem in different ways, not so much to restore the tradition for their audience as to subject it to radical historical criticism.  As this study demonstrates, hermeneutics does not solve the larger problem of contemporary Christian identity but it does enable exchange between very different accounts of the problem, in turn clarifying what is at stake in the interpretive task: an interpreter’s present conduct in the world.